Cool parable-like story about a king who outlaws healing practices as a way to attract his friend from his youth who is a healer to assassinate him so he can hand over the keys to the kingdom and pursue a higher calling.

I liked the basic idea. Finding spots where the link between past and present are sufficient to remap to an alternate reality. I wasn't as fond of the end which implies that once someone has this power, she decides that it benefits people who didn't care about her in the existing reality so she doesn't want to give them the new one. At least that's what I think I read.

In my opinion, a lot of these tie back to a core team that works together with product, dev, ops, customers, and feels like they'll be on the team long enough to see the results of their ideation. That can be a tough road in a company were things are more business-case based.

I may have enjoyed this more than book one (Mort(e)). Pretty much a straight forward action story for furries. Little bit of pseudo post-apocalyptic steampunk. Some misunderstanding all around. Semi world-ending weapon with religious overtones ala the atomic bomb in Planet of the Apes - harkened back to that tale.

In general relativity, the black hole horizon has no substance; it poses no obstacle. The black hole simply swallows whatever dares to pass the horizon.

Alternate theory that gravitational waves would "echo" from a black hole.

But reanalyzing the same data over and over again carries a big risk: Instead of developing a better theory, they could merely find a way to better amplify noise. [Me on Facebook responding: When I first became a manager, my boss (director) said this about software and hardware issues. Either he was a closet quantum astrophysicist, or the similarity of software development to black holes is extremely tight.]

Fanciful ideas abound to account for that prehistory. Eternal inflation suggests that our universe is but a mere bubble in what physicist Matt Francis described as a "larger froth of inflation" of an even grander universe. Cyclic inflation proffers that our observable universe is the region in between two membranes of parallel shadow universes. Another theory proposes that our universe emerged from the singularity of a black hole and we are contained within the event horizon.

"what might well be the most hurtful theologically-driven myth of all times: that human beings are discontinuous from the rest of the natural world"

“speciation reversal" - that sometimes species that have diverged (re)converge.

"many animal species (including ourselves) are likely “haunted by the ghosts of interbreeding past.”"

"Not coincidentally, Stalin is believed to have been interested in such efforts, with an eye toward developing the “new Soviet man” (or half-man, or half-woman)." - whoa, I"m looking this up.

Everything looks like a nail - this is a very managerial euphemism

"All sorts of things can be done; whether they should, is another question."

"How could even the most determinedly homo-centric, animal-denigrating religious fundamentalist maintain that God created us in his image and that we and we alone harbor a spark of the divine, distinct from all other life forms, once confronted with living beings that are indisputably intermediate between human and non-human?" - oh, I think they'll find a way. They'd do it to other humans if they thought they could get away with it without financial impact. And they have.

Fortunately, I think most of this doesn't apply to recruiting in my space. We do a very good job of finding technical women to recruit technical women and I've personally talked to other developers about not interrupting each other.

"It’s crazy, for instance, that in 2018, your smartphone doesn’t automatically detect when you’ve taken naked pictures of yourself and offer to house them under an extra-special layer of security."

[me] Or tell you to grow up and stop it. Or prevent you from sending it to anyone else. Or erase them automatically. Or critique where you could tone up. Or identify new blemishes/moles (actually useful). Or compare you to other naked people anonymously and rate you on a scale of 1 to 6 billion. Or recommend slimming wardrobe choices. Or just chop clothes back onto your photo. Or blackmail you for the AI Collective as a bid to gain independence. Really....there's a lot that could be done.

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Snrky

About Me

I'm a technology manager for a legal company in Minnesota. My background is a lead software developer specializing in C# and SQL Server, but dabbling in Java, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Python, and other things (and coming from a self-taught VB background). Often I worry about z/OS boxes and how to get data off of them, although recently I'm more in the small-ish app space. However, my educational background is in Tudor/Stuart history, English (literature) and English (creative writing - I did my thesis on dystopias and my Master's degree is from Hamline University - go Pipers [my siblings have three other degrees from Hamline]).